I don't know what's waiting for me around the corner and I don't know what else I'm going to be doing in the future - but you've got to enjoy things while you're doing them. There are tough times and mountains to climb, but you've got to go for it.
I got into figure skating for the art of it, as well as the sport, and how much I love it. And, you know, I do everything that I want. I march to my own drummer. Sometimes people have an issue with that, and I can't control it.
Injuries are a huge thing for skating. I think skating is a very unnatural sport for the body, very tough on the joints.
There're two different kinds of skating. There's the style skating, and there's the trick skating. He (Tony Hawk) does the trick skating so heavy duty, that he can overcome the style skating. There's always the chance that the style skater can come back, but the whole deal really is learning tricks.
I usually just write down what I'm doing and how I felt. How I felt if I'm skating fast, compared to if I'm skating slow or if I'm tired. I can always go back and look as a reference and see what I was doing. It's pretty much my life on ice.
As soon as I was introduced to ice speed skating, I was instantly hooked. I never thought about pursuing skating professionally; I just enjoyed doing it.
People tell me all the time you have to be mentally tough to win the championship, and I feel like enough people hype it up to where you have to act different come playoff time. But I'm not a tough guy. So I don't know how to be tough. I don't know what I'm 'supposed' to be doing.
As an audience member, I like to watch what they're doing, and that's one of the reasons I love skating: because it's a performance, and I love to perform. That's my favorite aspect of skating.
Doing art at Marlborough, where I went to school, was really quite tough, and I knew that it wasn't the direction I wanted to go. I'd rather show art and give people the joy of seeing it.
When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.
How a man perceives substance dictates the amount of substance in a man. To know the depth of anyone's true substance, simply measure the weight of what consumes and excites their inner drive.
When I was young, many people didn't know what figure skating was. Some who knew of it thought of it as dancing on ice. But, as I entered international competitions and got good results, many people got to know more about it and came to cheer for me.
For me, skateboarding is a lifestyle. I really don't know anything different. My life revolves around skating. If I wasn't a professional skateboarder, I'd still be skating every day.
Snowboarding's tough, because you've got to go to the mountains. For me, I love the skateboard season because I get to hangout at home and still be skating. I don't have to travel to Norway or Japan or these crazy places to be snowboarding.
It wasn't really until after I got out of art school that I realized that I'd been doing that sort of for the audience, for that context. Somehow, being alone in the room, it made no sense at all to make those kinds of paintings.
Make vegan friends! It's a tough row to hoe doing it alone.